Yes live at the Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Ontario, during their Drama Tour in 1980. Audience recording quality A- 00:00 - Young Person Guide To Orchestra/Close Encounters Intro; 02:46 - Does It Really Happen? 10:28 - Yours Is No Disgrace; 21:28 - Into The Lens; 30:31 - Clap; 34:09 - And You And I; 43:40 - Go Through This; 48:25 - Man In A White Car Suite; 55:05 - Parallels; 01:00:30 - We Can Fly From Here; 01:07:41 - Tempus Fugit (incl. instrumental jam); 01:16:01 - Amazing Grace/The Fish; 01:22:50 - Machine Messiah; 01:34:33 - Starship Trooper; 01:47:16 - Roundabout. Trevor Horn - lead vocals, guitars, tambourine; Steve Howe - guitars, backing vocals; Chris Squire - bass guitar, harmonica, backing vocals; Alan White - drums, percussion; Geoff Downes - CP80, synthesizers, Hammond Organ, Mellotron, vocoder. As i planned earlier in the year, i'm gonna start to upload Yes' Drama Tour shows form now on, since this so overlooked tour deserves much love from any Yes fan! Let's start with the very first show of 1980, meaning it features Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes during their first ever live performance as members of Yes. Songs such as Does It Really Happen, Into The Lens, Go Through This, Man In A White Car Suite, We Can Fly From Here, Tempus Fugit and Machine Messiah are played in concert for the first time ever as well! However, the concert itself isn't perfect by any means: maybe due stage nervousness (wich i'd understand pretty well considering the band's situation at that period), there's several musical issues throghout the whole set, wich becomes very glaring for my ears wich are accostumed with the tour's brillant musicianship! Yours Is No Disgrace, for example, has rough backing vocals, hesitant guitar playing in spot and lyric flubs from Trevor, the Man In A White Car Suite features Geoff hitting bad chords on the keyboards (the only time i ever heard him going that), and Machine Messiah is one of the worst live renditions of the song musically, with lots of timing issues and made-up notes on the instrumentals! If it wasn't enough, there's also equipament failure on some instances: Trevor's microphone dies at times (Into The Lens and Starship Trooper are the main cases) and Chris' bass guitar absolutely dies off early into Tempus Fugit, wich causes him to leave Steve, Geoff and Alan to improvise for nearly three minutes before he get a spare bass! This inccident even forced them to strip down a bit the Fish instrumental section! Despite these off moments, we also do have some positive stuff this time: Trevor is singing consistently well during most part of the show, although he does have some hard time singing Jon's tunes here and there, but nothing of too disturbing. He sings a pretty decent performance of Parallels, wich is infamous for sounding terrible for most of the tour. His voice actually sounds pretty simillar to the Portland (9/2) show, giving on songs and taking on others. What's even better is that the audio quality is stunning, so every nuance of the performance is avaliable! Anyway, this is not the best Drama show, but if you want to hear the Buggles performing with Yes for the first time, along with the first airing of classic Drama songs in excellent audio, don't you miss this concert!!

• published: 17 Jan 2014
• views: 149